Pictured above: a Netrunner player
some assholes watched ghost in the shell and decided to make a card game out of it and that's how Netrunner got made
Netrunner is a very cool asymmetrical LCG where one player acts as an evil cybercorporation and the other plays as a hacker that wants to steal the corporation's secrets
The corporation wins the game by either advancing enough of their agendas by installing them in remote servers protected by security software called ICE, or by murdering the runner
The runner wins by stealing enough of the corporation's agendas before they can score them, or else surviving until the corporation runs out of cards
it's really fun, and you can play for free online using a service like jinteki.net. which is good, because the game's been around long enough that getting up to speed with the current metagame can be expensive
When it comes to corporations, you have the following choices:
Jinteki is a corporation that works in genetics, cloning, and biological androids like in Bladerunner. They generally focus on traps and ways to deceive the runner into triggering negative effects for themselves.
Haas-Bioroid is a competitor of Jinteki, working on mechanical robots instead of biological ones. Their focus is on establishing strong ICE to defend easily advanceable agendas.
Weyland Consortium has diversified assets, focusing on industrial machinery and private security. Their main focus is on doing "meat" damage, that is, physically harming the runner.
NBN is a news and entertainment conglomeration. Their focus is on "tagging" the runner, putting a target on the runner's back that allows them to hit them hard with powerful effects.
The runners are meanwhile divided into three factions:
Anarchs just want to buck the control that corporations exert on society. Their focus is on viruses, targeting and destroying corporation cards to leave them defenseless
Criminals are in it for the cash. They have a lot of cards that can make or even steal money, which they dump into running constantly.
Shapers just like to run for the fun of it. Their focus is on building up lots and lots of resources, so they can deal with anything the corporation can throw at them.
You can read the rules of how to play here. If you're interested in buying some physical cards, the best place to start is the Core Set. Unfortunately, there's a real dumbshit quirk to the core set, which is that it doesn't give you 3 copies of every card. In fact, it only gives you 2 copies of a whole bunch of them, and there's no easy way to fill out the missing cards. None of the expansions work like this. Also I'm new to the game but I've heard that they're gonna start phasing old expansions out of legal play, so if you're buying expansions maybe tend toward the more recent ones?
If you have any questions about the game, building decks or how rules work or something, feel free to ask in here. I've only been playing for a week, and we have a lot of other relative newcomers too. Actually on that note, if more experienced players could maybe avoid using a ton of esoteric acronyms and lingo, that'd be great.
I'll probably add other shit here when I'm not on my phone?